Kindlefish Turns Kindle Into Worldwide Translator

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Kindlefish Turns Kindle Into Worldwide Translator

The 3G Kindle is The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Sure, you can read books on it, but with its web browser, you can also access Wikipedia from anywhere in the world. Until now, though, there was one thing it didn't do so well – translation. That has been fixed by Kindlefish, made by Gadget Lab reader Nicholas.

Nicholas found that Google Translate is badly suited to the e-reader's admittedly limited web browser. "Standard Google Translate doesn't work for the Kindle," he writes on his blog, "and the mobile Google Translate page returns text that is too small to be easily read, and a little clunky for use on the Kindle."

To get around this, he wrote a new front-end called Kindlefish, a homage to the universally translating Babelfish from Douglas Adams' five-part Hitchhiker's trilogy. The interface is simple, letting you set three preferred languages for quick access, and one input language (English by default). You just type your phrase on the Kindle's little keyboard and hit the "Translate" button.

Non-Latin text looks particularly good

Kindlefish outputs the translation in very large type, so you can show it to a waiter or storekeeper without having to pronounce anything. Asian alphabets look particularly good on the e-ink screen.

We tested it out, and it works well enough. With the Kindle's less-than-ergonomic keyboard and the slowness of its browser, though, you'll need patience to use it. In other words, it's not going to help you pick up that French cutie sitting across from you in the cafe, but it might help you get a glass of mineral water from the waiter.

If you want to try it out, head over to the Kindlefish site on your Kindle. The site is on free hosting, but if it is swamped by traffic then Nicholas plans to move it to a more permanent home.